Pleo unboxing, er, hatching -- photos and video

Hard to believe it's been almost two years since Ugobe's Pleo was first announced, but today one of our very own showed up at our doorstep, sweet as a newborn (new-hatched?) Camarasaurus. Pleo's certainly undergone a lot of physical changes since we saw it in the early days, now sporting a more adorable shape (as well as cameras and sensors studded all over its precious little head). A few first impressions and fresh details

• Pleo's skin is rubbery-sticky (a little like the soles on a brand new pair of Cons). We can totally see this thing feeling like a dinosaur.

• The motors on this thing are loud. Like, kind of distractingly loud. Yet somehow it remains ineffably adorable. You just want to take care of the little bugger.

• You hatch it early on by flipping its power switch and petting it until it awakens from its deep, late-Jurassic-era slumber.

• Jury's still out on the Tim Allen-esque grunting noises.

• Ugobe PR let us know that the first version of Life OS (the software that powers Pleo) isn't really set up to "evolve" as it was supposed to, but there will be new versions of Live OS in 2008, which will enable behavioral optimizations and that "evolution" thing.

• There will be an SDK! Take that, Aibo. Poor, poor Aibo, dead as a dino--never mind.

• Despite having a massive, heavy NiMH battery pack, it's only 2200mAh;

We're still letting Pleo get situated and acquainted (read: charge) but we've got a hands-on gallery below, and video and plenty more Pleo details after the break. So, who's down for a quick refresher on chaos theory?
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More specs

• Camera-based light detection navigation

• Eight body sensors: head, chin, shoulders, back, legs

• Four foot switches, two mics, two speakers

• Orientation sensor and mouth IR detector

• Two 32-bit processors (central and image processing)

• Four 8-bit motor coprocessors

• 14 motors, 100 gears

• USB and SD